The LGDSS suggests an approach for councils to build good, value for money digital services people want to use. As councils start to adopt it there's an emerging view of what "good looks like" across the sector.

Councils provide different combinations of hundreds of services, but many of them are broadly similar across local government. Now we have the LGDSS and there's an agreed set of principles for transformation and delivery it's a become lot easier for councils to work together.

There'll always be a place for informal discussion, through initiatives like Unmentoring, events like LocalGovCamp, channels like Slack, or just picking up the phone and talking to someone.

As service transformation projects become mainstream across local government there's a growing need for resource and expertise on a formal basis. I've done this myself and used Digital Marketplace to find an individual specialist to bring in resource for a little as a week.

I've found it excellent, but what if I need a resource couple of days, or even just a few hours? Also, imagine if I could employ the expertise of someone from another council who's already completed the work I'm starting on, so I don't need to start from scratch.

Imagine if there was a pool of local government talent I could formally call on to do this. My organisation would pay for their time, and they could be paid overtime by their organisation to do the work.

With your organisation's permission you could add yourself to the pool, perhaps you might say you're just available for a couple of hours a week and if another council books your time, you become unavailable for that week.

This is easier said than done of course. A platform needs to be created or adapted, payment terms agreed and a mechanism for this built, employment and procurement law considered, and councils need to be onboarded (although there's only 400 and it just needs to be done once) plus a lot more. However, I think with enough will and a little investment this could work.

So who's up for transforming collaboration across Local Government?

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Transformation, digital or not, starts with understanding the needs of the user through research. This should be obvious, but in local government too often I've seen "build it and they will come" approach applied.

You may have seen this slide I put together to help explain digital transformation

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So here's the before

and as you can see it's completely a manual process. Stuff might be recorded electronically but it takes someone to do something seven time to make the process work and send it to the parish or the district.

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